


life is but a dream

by Imagineitdear



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Angst, Captain America: The First Avenger, Dissociation, Hurt No Comfort, M/M, Magical Healing Touch, Medical Experimentation, Medical Torture, Nightmares, Non-Consensual Touching, Open to Interpretation, Or at least very little, Or something more sinister, Touch-Starved, Unhappy Ending, Unreliable Narrator, World War II, fear of needles
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-21
Updated: 2016-11-21
Packaged: 2018-09-01 06:18:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,247
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8612554
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Imagineitdear/pseuds/Imagineitdear
Summary: “You with me, pal?” the voice murmurs, lips brushing his neck, and it’s Steve, Bucky knows it is Steve. But he also knows, in the hurt center of his charred heart, that it’s Steve only because his mind wishes it to be.Or: While Zola experiments on him Bucky dreams, and wakes, and dreams and wakes, until he's not sure which is which anymore.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Hello! I've been reading so many wonderful Bucky Barnes stories on here I thought it high time I contribute. This story is based on some meta I read way back when on tumblr. I have no idea where to find it again, but it was another post about Bucky's sad life after Azzano that I immediately accepted as canon and couldn't stop thinking about. And thus this fic was born. 
> 
> Please mind the tags. There is a lot of torture. Also enjoy! Lol.

Hands on him.

Bucky feels. Hands reaching with fingers, touching with interest; the clerical kind, the touch Steve swore the doctors learn so they can forget they’re treating human beings.

This doctor might know, but he certainly doesn’t care.

He has Bucky strapped down, no surprises, the man is hardly bigger than Steve and only in the middle. Bucky could hold his own easily against the man, even in his current weak state. The doctor questions Bucky about his troop, Allied movement in Italy, and his officers, all in a strange accent he can’t place. In a disinterested tone, like this is not his true purpose. Bucky recites back his name, rank and serial like a good soldier boy, and wonders distantly how Steve gets through medical examinations, all the questions rattled off without care for a real answer.

When the needles and the knives come out, Bucky wonders how Steve can be so brave.

First, a vial of blood extracted from his arm. Procedural. Bucky puts up a fight, makes them hold him down, but it’s more out of respect to his remaining dignity than anything. Then, a syringe already full of liquid, injected back in. The doctor has his assistants wait about an hour, when Bucky is sweating and a little hazy, before the cutting begins.

Steve got in a knife fight once. It was one of those times Bucky wasn’t around, couldn’t save his ass like usual. Stupid punk. It wasn’t his fault, Steve insisted, a first. Usually he just pouted, “They had it coming.” Not that time.

“They just didn’t like the look of me,” he explained to Bucky when he walked into their shared apartment and saw the smaller man, trying to stitch up a gash in his chest. Nothing too serious, thank god, but anything at all could turn serious when it came to Steve’s frail health. “Is that so?” he retorted, not really believing Steve. He quickly took over, not letting his hands shake as he threaded the pale, bloody skin back together and tied off each stitch. He couldn’t afford to let them shake, times like that. Maybe that’s how he came in so steady with a gun.

Bucky thinks he owes Steve an apology now, considering his current situation. Being the newest of the dozen or so bodies the doctor has experimented on, hand-picked from the other prisoners. Just because that rat of a man _liked_ the look of him.

They cut him and Bucky keeps saying his name, rank and number, like that’ll mean anything. Hands on him. Hands touching his ribcage, his hipbones, the injection site in his arm. Steady against his skin as the other hand cuts a precise incision. They’re murmuring in German about it, and hell if Bucky remembers a single word besides “Nein” right now, but he’s pretty sure they’re keeping track of how long the skin takes to heal.

The assistants take their notes to the doctor, who shuffles paper behind Bucky at a desk, making approving sounds every now and then.

They leave him alone for a day, let him up once to piss and shit, and then—

And then Bucky loses his mind.

“Tell me how it feels,” the doctor says, holding up a syringe full of something blue. There’s a whole line of syringes filled with the same, his assistants bustling around as they take position: at Bucky’s neck, arm, and thigh.

He tries not to scream.

He fails.

Acid, it must be acid, injected into his bloodstream, into his organs, his very cells. Bucky dimly realizes the true purpose of all the restraints; he’s twisting and bucking and jerking, yelling his voice hoarse as the chemicals shoot through him. It’s almost for his protection.

But they won’t stop. It takes both assistants to hold down a limb, but the doctor manages to inject the contents of all remaining ten syringes into different sites of Bucky’s writhing body. Unlucky thirteen.

His brain keeps snapping, lapsing and then reconnecting, forgetting he is anything more than pain, pain pain, until for a horrid few seconds Bucky remembers everything else—then it’s back to pain again, and some part of him is relieved.

At least pain is simple.

Hands on him. The next thing he is aware of. And Bucky doesn’t want to get up early, not on a Sunday. He groans, tries to roll over and fend off his friend. “No mass. Too early.”

“Your fault for coming home so late,” a voice says, low and fond. Bucky smiles, feeling . . . warm.

“Took Betsy out dancing after, s’all,” he murmurs, and feels a hand on his chest. He imagines it smoother, kinder than it is.

“Guess we could stay in. But you’re cooking breakfast, Buck,” Steve says, and Bucky can almost see him; can almost taste the warm summer air and the sleepy edge to Steve’s smile. He reaches for it, tries to touch back.

His arm won’t move.

Bucky slams back into reality, to the force of exhaustion, pain, and misery. Hunger, too, the usual gnawing edge in his stomach now fierce and raw.

“Drink.” An order, and after a moment Bucky finds his eyes and tries to open them. They feel almost glued shut, probably thanks to the unwilful tears he shed before the pain finally knocked him out.

An assistant is holding up a tube, and when he meets Bucky’s eyes he presses it to Bucky’s lips. Bucky sucks, and is rewarded with what at least tastes like water.

It rushes a fogginess over his brain, though, a heavy gray blanket that makes his eyes slow and his brain slower as a tray is set on his stomach, and his shirt is pulled up to his neck again.

The assistant—blue-eyed, Bucky notes, for whatever reason—takes the first instrument from the tray. A simple knife. He cuts just above Bucky’s last rib, and Bucky feels like laughing at himself for yesterday— _yesterday, or has it been longer?_ —for starting to recite his rank, name and number over such a small dose of pain.

The next instrument is small, skinny and metal, and with a switch a tip of blue flame spurts out of the end. Bucky watches, mesmerized, as the blue-eyed assistant presses it against his skin, just a few inches above the cut. It burns, obviously, and after a while he smells his own burnt flesh; Bucky tries not to get even hungrier even as he yells.

The last item is just a corked vial of clear fluid, and Bucky wonders if he should submit to drinking it as well. But the assistant only uncorks it, and then evenly lets the fluid trickle a line across his skin, just a few inches above the charred burn.

Acid, it’s acid again, and though it doesn’t hurt as bad as inside his veins Bucky recoils, screaming and thrashing. The tray clatters off him. The remaining acid flings into the air, spraying the assistant who immediately howls, clutching at his face.

Bucky focuses all his energy into his arms, straining against the leather straps. His mind is still foggy, but his body is burning with something more than just pain. The middle restraint, over his forearms and hips, snaps.

“Helfen!” the blue-eyed assistant yells, hand still over one eye and crouching. Two very large hydra soldiers immediately come in, slam Bucky down onto the metal table and bark things Bucky doesn’t understand. A rope is tied around him and the table, a hasty replacement, and the assistant is led away sobbing.

The soldiers beat him to within an inch of his life.

Hands. Hands on him, Bucky slowly comes to, and the dream was so horrible his brain immediately shudders away from it. He blinks his eyes open and Steve is there, eyes assessing, fingers lightly touching the shiner Bucky can feel pounding in his face. “Stay with me, bud,” Steve murmurs, “you might be concussed.”

“Don’t wear it as well as you,” he says, and the concern on Steve’s face twists into exasperation.

“I didn’t ask for your help, the two fellas just—“

“Say no more. You start it, I finish it. How the cards were dealt, pal.” He winks, even though it stings, and it’s worth it; Steve’s thousand-watt glare, all brow and pouty lip, secretly is Bucky’s favorite thing. His only thing.

“Yeah, well now you’re going’ta show up to work tomorrow and get fired on the spot for looking like trouble,” Steve points out, finally pulling his hand away from Bucky’s cheekbone.

His bone aches for Steve to put it back.

“Just like you did working groceries?” Bucky gripes, and Steve rolls his eyes.

“Don’t count. Mr. Reed was lookin’ for a reason to fire me, Buck, that’s just the one he found.”

Bucky reaches out, manages to brush the hair from Steve’s forehead, and for whatever reason acute relief fills his chest, that he can reach out this time— _this time? Was there a time before?—_ and not be restrained from touching. Steve gets a little red, but he scowls. He backs away, goes to their corner kitchen and turns on the faucet.

“Drink this,” he says, coming back with a glass full, blue eyes fond.

— _Blue eyes, above him, cutting him, injecting him, crying out “Helfen!”—_

Steve whips the glass of water at him, and Bucky jerks awake, shocked, gasping and trying to lift his head. Some water still goes down his nose, though, and he coughs and sputters, twisting his face to the side.

“Good. You’ve slept too long,” the doctor says above him, patting him on the cheek with a chubby hand. Bucky recoils, stomach turning, and if he had something to throw up he would. As it is he coughs the remaining water out, wheezing and trying to reorient himself in reality. The doctor turns to the remaining assistant, the one who didn’t get acid sprayed in his face, who brings a tray of syringes, syringes filled with that same blaring shade of blue. Bucky’s chest constricts.

“Please—please—“ he hears himself beg, twisting in his bonds, but finds the broken strap replaced with two new ones, buckled so tightly he can hardly squirm. “No, don’t, what do you want—“

The doctor doesn’t answer, just brings a syringe and collects blood from him. It doesn’t hurt, but Bucky struggles anyway. “No, _no_ , please, please I can’t, please,” he babbles incoherently, hyperventilating as the doctor places the first syringe at a point in his neck. The assistant slams a hand against Bucky’s cheek, flattening half of his face onto the metal table. Bucky is trapped.

Bucky is trapped, and he can’t _breathe_.

The blue poison slides sickly into him, immediately begins boiling in Bucky’s veins and up through his head. He chokes—maybe on spit, maybe on his own tongue—as he feels something come up his throat, foaming. It spills out of the side of his mouth, with his head turned like it is, and Bucky is at least grateful he’s not drowning in his own discharge before the next syringe goes into his left arm, and his whole world simmers down to only pain.

He is distantly aware of his body, his bones, trembling against the metal table and the leather straps, vibrating as the acid invades his very cells. But the hands on him stay clinical. Just another test subject. He is another example of man, reduced to flesh.

He is being unmade.

Steve shakes him awake, shakes Bucky back into his trembling body, only to scream, “It’s an ambush!”

Bucky’s not sure how he slept through this much noise, only grateful as Steve hauls him out of his fox hole with less trouble than he should have. Shrapnel, bombs, enemy fire; a display from hell awaits. Bucky finds a good spot in the trench and fires back; shoots and shoots more krauts even as they trickle down the hill like an overfilling dam; inevitable.

Steve shouldn’t be here. Steve should _not_ be here.

Then they start evaporating, the enemy blitzed out of existence with a blue flare— _blue, god, Bucky is sick of blue_ —and a tank the size of Russia rolls in. They’ve got no chances.

Steve shouldn’t be here. He can’t work, he can’t be extra manpower for these hydra heathens, and before a week goes by Bucky can see the guards’ eyes on him. That only means one thing.

Bucky take his place instead.

He gets strapped to the table, and it’s cold and metal— _remembers dripping foam, ripping straps, except he’s never been here before, has he?_ —and the doctor comes. When he comes his two assistants follow, and one of them has blue eyes, just like he remembered, but a familiar face. Familiar, except it’s been marred with burns.

Blue eyes. Acid burns. _Steve’s face._

Bucky screams awake, shuddering into the dank reality of the table he is strapped to, the cold bleeding light from the windows, the shuffle of paper behind him meaning the good doctor is near. No Steve. No, and Bucky almost could laugh, no one in their right goddamn mind would put Steve out there in the front, thank all that is merciful.

Steve’s not Hydra. He’s not. He’s home in Brooklyn, safe as a bird, sketching cityscape for the umpteenth time, worrying at his pencil with his teeth. No acid burns on his face. Maybe a busted knuckle or two, or even a uniform for whatever he’s doing in Jersey.

But _safe_.

Bucky relaxes against the table, let’s himself be unbuckled by the two hyrda guards with no fuss to piss into a pot. He’s not eating anything, so that’s it now. They strap him back down, hands on him, and Bucky stares at the stone ceiling above and wonders if he can make himself a good dream. Like the first two. Imagine, Steve’s hair falling over his forehead, the blush on him when Bucky brushes it back. He’ll look down, show off his long eyelashes, then look straight at Bucky, head-on.

Unapologetic, like Steve ever is. Bucky lets himself float in the idea, the thought of hands on Steve, fingers touching the paleness of his neck with care. Pressing, feeling the bone of his jaw, scoping out his collarbones and the light freckles on his shoulders Bucky never should have noticed. But he did. He did, and he imagines tracing patterns over them now, making up the heavens with new constellations, a heaven he can believe in. An angel to take him home.

Bucky sighs, feels something cut into his left ribcage this time, but then chokes on the breath halfway as the blade twists deeper.

His eyes shoot open, wondering who it is that decided to kill him, but the doctor only stares down at him with interest, knife imbedded in his chest. Bucky stares back. He’s not sure what to do. Scream, probably, except that gut reaction seems to only be reserved for the blue poison now. He tries to keep breathing, is surprised to find he still can manage hitching breaths for now, and waits to bleed out.

The doctor pulls the knife out, and Bucky yelps. The doctor smirks, and waits.

He sits with Bucky for three hours, waiting, while Bucky feels a strange remnant of the acid burn through him. More like fire, scalding and itching at his nerves where the blade has struck. Bucky tries to leave, to join Steve again in dreamland, but he can’t manage it with those eager, beady eyes on him. Worse than hands touching places that fingers can’t reach. He starts reciting his name and rank again. He starts praying for that angel.

Bucky squeezes his eyes shut and waits for an end.

It doesn’t come. The doctor inspects the wound, leaves for many hours and returns for another inspection, before laughing very loudly. Proudly. He pats Bucky on the shoulder, leans down to close to say, “Very good,” before scribbling furiously onto his clipboard.

Bucky cranes his neck hard enough to look and see fully the new, pink skin where the wound should be.

He’s been unmade.

He gags, managing to yack out a bit of yellow stomach fluid as his empty stomach heaves. The doctor is so kind as to dab it away with a dirty rag, smiling proudly down at his test subject. He uses the same rag to scrub a bit of the blood encrusted on Bucky’s chest.

They draw a lot of blood, the next time— _the next day, or the next week, time doesn’t make sense anymore_ —so much that Bucky’s head rushes. Then the doctor orders the assistant to do something in German. He dozes off, waking up briefly at the pinprick of a needle sliding into his wrist only to nod off again upon recognizing the hanging bag of fluids it’s attached to. Apparently he’s earned the right to nutrients.

He wakes up later, still hollow but no longer hungry.

The remaining assistant tries his healing factor again, this time with poison. He pinches Bucky’s nose off and covers his mouth till Bucky has to swallow—it takes him a surprising two and a half minutes to give in. Bucky feels the effects immediately, the swelling of his tongue, the ripping pain in his stomach. His eyes blur, his breathing tightens. His throat starts closing off.

Bucky gasps like a fish, feeling his heart stutter in its haste, and is dimly aware of the assistant and the doctor staring down at him with clerical interest. Touching him, his pulse, his forehead, with impersonal hands and unattached gazes. He tells himself he’s glad it’s clinical. He tells himself he’s glad.

The assistant leaves, and the doctor is behind him shuffling papers. Bucky’s brain is back to being a haze of clouds, not unlike the water they give him, but his stomach feels like it’s being ripped, dissolved and eaten away all at once.

He is dimly aware of the doctor cursing, a distant rumbling, and then the doctor’s mouse-like face above him. He does not speak, merely pulls out a syringe of blue fluid, the color so violent this time it pierces Bucky’s eyes, and positions it over his heart. “No, no, no, stop please sir no please don’t please please I’ll do any—“ Bucky hears himself say, in a voice he doesn’t recognize.

The doctor pays him no heed. He slams the syringe down, right into Bucky’s chest, and as the liquid is pumped directly into his heart he knows this is the end. This is the line, the point of no return. His body seizes, spasms beyond his control, and the doctor disappears from view. Leaving Bucky on fire.

He screams himself hoarse, smells smoke and wonders if it’s him burning. His body keeps jerking, limbs sprawled loose only to tighten unnaturally, and the acid destroys his every nerve. Bucky stares up at the stone ceiling, wondering if it’s time yet. _Please God, let it be time soon._

He mumbles his rank, name and number, more for the comfort than anything now. It’s not him anymore, after all. James Barnes is burned away, consumed in a merciless inferno of blue flame. Out of existence, just like those krauts the hydra tank blasted straight to hell.

Bucky waits for his angel.

He wakes up to one, the archangel Michael, and goddamn if Steve ain’t his image like Bucky always thought. Just grander. Just mightier. But not better, even though the angel can rip away his straps, straps Bucky hasn’t thought to rip himself in days— _weeks?_ —and says, “It’s Steve.” Bucky is mighty alright with heaven if this is its way. He agrees, lets the angel tow him through hell and escape from its devil.

Not until they stop marching for the night, Angel Steve’s big hands fidgeting over a growing fire and his blue eyes pure and long-lashed, but wiser—not till then does Bucky wake up from the dream and realize he’s not dead at all.

The doctor stands over him, touching his neck for a pulse, and looks pleased with his findings. Maybe he thought Bucky was dead too. Bucky wishes they were both right.

He pulls Bucky’s shirt up, all the way to his neck again, and it’s then Bucky realizes there’s only one thing on his tray. A corked vial, larger than usual, and Bucky just knows what’s inside.

“Please, not that, not that,” he starts babbling as the doctor uncorks the vial, tipping it precariously over Bucky’s bare chest.

“Please don’t, please, no, _no_ , _NO_ —“

The acid splashes out, consuming him, eating away at his skin, and Bucky _screams_ , it’s reaching his heart, it’s burrowing into his bones—

“Buck, BUCK, wake up, Bucky, come on,” a voice says, anguished, and Bucky thrashes against his restraints, he won’t lie still for this, he can’t, his body won’t—

“Bucky, hey listen to me, you’re safe, you’re right here, you’re safe,” the voice continues, low and slowly quieter, into his ear. Bucky feels his body slump, give in to the restraints, and he lets out a sob.

Hands on him. Bucky feels it. Not restraints then, or at least not the kind he thought, but arms around him. Caging him, not between leather and metal; between flesh and flesh, warm yet unyielding. Bucky cannot complain, not when it’s almost comforting like this.

“You with me, pal?” the voice murmurs, lips brushing his neck, and it’s Steve, Bucky knows it is Steve. But he also knows, in the hurt center of his charred heart, that it’s Steve only because his mind wishes it to be.

“With you,” he says anyway, because where else would he rather be? Certainly not coherent, certainly not awake on that metal table staring up at the stone ceiling above. Praying for it to crumble down on top of him. Bury him.

Tension eases out of the arms he’s wrapped in; Bucky blinks his eyes open to see night, trees and men lying on the forest floor. Some of them still looking his way, pity in their gazes. Bucky shuts his eyes away from it, leans back further into the comforting constraint that is Steve.

“You’re safe,” Steve tells him again, and then lets go. Bucky sees they are both on a ratty old blanket, spread out and still not big enough for both him and the magnificent angel disguised as Steve. He can’t complain. At least his brain didn’t make his friend Hydra again.

Bucky allows himself to be pulled down, on his side rather than his back, mercy of mercies. Steve scoots close behind him, their legs and shoulders touching. “We’ll get you straight to a doctor in the mornin’,” Steve murmurs into his neck, trying to be comforting, but Bucky can’t help how his entire spine freezes at the thought. “Buck?” Steve asks, one big hand touching his shoulder in concern.

Bucky shakes his head, knowing the man will feel it more than see it. Knowing that he’s really just arguing with himself right now. “No doctors.” _No more than I already have to see when I’m awake._

“You need to get looked at. Checked on, make sure you’re alright,” Steve insists. “Whatever they did to you—“

“Steve,” Bucky stops him, harsh. “I’m tired.”

After a long, tense moment, he feels Steve nod. “Alright. We’ll talk in the morning.”

Bucky doesn’t answer.

He wakes up and Steve offers him water—which is just his brain making it easier to accept the water the assistant has woke him to give, the kind that makes his head cloudy. He drinks it greedily.

Steve fades quickly, however, when the man starts cutting incisions in Bucky’s skin, watching how fast they knit together. Bucky watches too, as if he’s looking down from the stone ceiling, watches as his body is opened up entirely, cracked open, a living wound, and he can see his broken heart, caged by his ribs, glowing an iridescent blue, brighter and more poisonous with every beat—

“Bucky, just a dream, it’s okay, just a dream,” Steve’s voice says, and Bucky blinks his eyes to see the angel Steve again. He tries to hold back his disappointment, that his brain has glommed onto this new image without any regard for the real shape of his best friend, but he’s happy to see it nonetheless.

“You’re bigger,” he can’t help pointing out anyway, and is rewarded with a sassy grin from Steve.

“Yeah.”

“Taller, can hardly put my arm around ya,” Bucky complains, sitting up. Dawn is nearly arrived, the men busy as they ready to march.

“Not like you’ve tried,” Steve quips as he stands. True enough. Bucky immediately remedies that, getting up to sling an arm around the impossibly-wide shoulders. He has to get on his toes to really make himself fit again.

“Guess you’re right,” Steve says with a small smirk. His eyes are tight, though, tight and sad.

Bucky knocks their shoulders, pleased when Steve seems surprised by the force and loses that look. They march back, everyone calling Steve “Cap,” and “Captain,” and finally, “Captain America.”

It makes a silly kind of sense, but Bucky still find his brain damn hilarious for coming up with this.

By the time the hoopla dies down at the base the injured are taken care of, and Bucky keeps to the tent he’s been assigned with Jones— _Gabe, he’d looked alright last time Bucky saw him, just hopeless and exhausted as Bucky was dragged away_ —to avoid being sent to the medics. Just thinking about it too hard woke him up last time; no telling what would wrench him out of this miraculous, ideal world next.

Luckily this strong, upstanding, G.I. of Steve Rogers is a busy man, wanted by both those of higher and lower rank. The dream shifts to a voyage, heading towards England apparently, every time his mind manages to escape the metal table, each time he falls asleep. But it’s getting easier. Not to be there—but to pretend that is the dream, and this is the truth.

Bucky prays it can be.

“Buck?” he hears at his door, the little tiny room they gave him and Dugan to share after arriving in London, though Dugan is long gone to the nearest live pub. A sharp knock follows, and Bucky lets the giant Steve in.

He takes up most of the little space there is. “Just wanted to . . . see how you’re doing,” Steve says, sitting down on one of the skinny beds. He pats next to him.

“I’m alright,” Bucky responds, honestly. He doesn’t sit down.

(Secretly, he wonders if the fact he can see that green fleck in Steve’s right eye, and the perfect shape of the bump of his nose, and the sadness in Steve’s smiles, is reason to hope. What if this new world he keeps coming back to is the truth after all? Would that be so impossible?)

“You’ve been real quiet,” Steve argues, not unkindly. Bucky still bristles at the accusation.

“It’s a war, Steve. If I was loud I’d be dead.”

“No, I know that, but it’s been three weeks—“

— _three weeks, since when? Since the last time Bucky woke up on the metal table? Since this dream started? Since it last ended?_ _Since_ —

“—and you haven’t laughed or smiled or been yourself at all.” Bucky stares at him, uncomprehending, till he realizes he would have to dig further to understand what this Steve is talking about, if he is in fact the Steve from before.

Because yes, the James Barnes of before, he told a naughty joke or two. He smirked and cackled and teased as good as the best. He couldn’t fit the cigarettes round his mouth right, his mouth was too wide from smiling.

James Barnes was a man of levity, a man who took sorrow and turned it sideways, the better to laugh at its shape. James Barnes would be first at the pub, right now, getting the spirits up, holding his own in the contest of who could best keep his liquor.

But James Barnes is a relic. He was unmade.

“And what am I supposed to think about you, huh?” Bucky fires back, louder than he intended. But he can feel the burning, closer to the surface than it usually is, threatening to bring him back from down under into a world of metal and pulsing blue.

And Bucky is scared he’ll never escape again.

“What do you mean—“

“I mean who’ve you been? Not the Steve Rogers I knew!” Bucky yells, and Steve stands up. Taller than him, and ain’t that just a hoot. “Parading around, stick up your ass, giving orders like you weren’t the one receiving them a second ago. Big and tough, now, no mouth on you anymore. Just another puppet, another goddamn propaganda.”

Steve stares at him, too long. Bucky tries to swallow, tries to keep his gaze. The silence between them stretches on, beyond uncomfortable. Finally the man says, too quiet, “They want a team. Colonel Phillips does, I mean, he gave me permission to form it. Taking out Hydra bases.”

Bucky stares. He hears the words, but nothing is clicking. His brain is disconnecting, then reattaching too late, too late to understand this pretty world it’s created. Except it’s not pretty, nothing short of brutal and ugly, if Bucky can’t keep Steve from danger. At least in the reality of metal, blood, and poison, Bucky has that to hold onto.

At least in that reality Steve had stayed home, hadn’t joined Bucky in hell.

“I wanted to ask who you’d recommend,” Steve continues, oblivious. “You know more men and better than I do, and—“

“Dugan and Jones,” Bucky cuts him off with, trying to think of who could best keep Steve’s ass in line. “Monty, and Dernier if you can get ‘em. Morita. And me, of course.”

“Buck, are you sure—“

“I’m fine, pal.”

“Even so, you don’t have to—“

“Would you let me leave ya behind?”

Steve looks at him, sad. “You already did, once.”

“This is different,” Bucky insists, sitting on the bed and pulling Steve down with him. His blue eyes— _blue, but safe, safe and kind and warm, not cold_ —regard Bucky with concern. “Colonel Phillips will agree, you gotta have someone watching your six. And buddy, I’m the best there is.”

Steve looks him up and down, and slowly starts nodding. “Alright. Alright, I’ll ask the boys. They’re all at the pub, I think.” He stands up, and Bucky follows after him.

“What? Maybe I fancy a drink,” he says breezily when Steve gives him a questioning look, strolling past him through the door.

Steve’s face nearly cracks with the force of his grin. It must have been the right thing to say.

They spend the rest of the evening together, the other men drinking and singing, Agent Carter making an appearance, and Bucky lets himself believe, at least for tonight, that he’s truly escaped. Steve, this walking miracle, really did single-handedly rescue the 107th and burn the Hydra fortress to the ground.

If that’s the case, though, it also means Bucky will have to fight Hydra, and end up right back where he started—with the doctor, and the syringes, and the torture. But even more terrifying, to the hands on him. Clinical and detached. Every touch making him less human, more . . . what? Machine? Animal?

Bucky lays down, resting his eyes and the dream shifts; suddenly Bucky is back in Brooklyn, Steve walking at his side, short and red-nosed and smiling easily. They carry a bag of groceries each, and a cold wind blows through the city. Snow crunches below his feet.

Steve is prattling about art class, about his big ideas for a painting, and he keeps purposefully bumping into Bucky as they walk. Bucky should shove him back, that’s how it works, but he doesn’t want Steve to slip on the ice. The apartment is freezing when they walk inside, so they keep on their coats and shoes. Steve keeps chattering up a storm. “. . . since the war’s end, of course, so maybe they’ll think—“

“The war’s over?” Bucky stops him, blinking and dumbstruck. Steve looks up from where he’s been putting away the bread, blue eyes soft.

“Yeah, Buck. Hey. Come here,” he says, beckoning with spread arms, and Bucky lets himself settle into the cold but strong grasp of Steve around him, bony but familiar. “It’s over. You’re safe. You’re home.”

Bucky inhales, but the air rattles around in his chest, shuddering out. Steve holds him when Bucky can’t stop the shuddering, when it takes hours— _days?—_ for the tension to ease. This is all he ever wanted. Bucky presses a kiss to the skin of Steve’s neck, and feels the smaller man shiver slightly. But he doesn’t pull away. And this is all Bucky could ever want.

But he wakes up, because happiness like that just doesn’t exist in reality. And true reality has wrenched him from the deep, finally, uglier and more vivid than ever.

“You’ve slept a long time,” Steve says, but it’s in the doctor’s voice, and Steve’s arms melt away from where they were wrapped around Bucky. The doctor is above him, shining a light into both of Bucky’s eyes. He flinches away. The little man smiles, pleased, and takes blood from his arm. Bucky doesn’t resist. He blinks up at the stone ceiling, barely paying attention as the doctor and his assistant speak rapid-fire German and touch the pink places on his chest that should be scars. Gloved fingers, tracing his skin, and Bucky retches.

“Hydra has perfected you,” the doctor says in English, peering over Bucky’s face with greedy eyes. A pudgy hand grabs his jaw, moving it from side to side as the doctor looks him up and down. “You were the first to survive it. We cannot find why, however. Do you know why, soldier?”

Bucky jerks his head out of the doctor’s grip.

The doctor looks him up and down then turns to the assistant, speaking to him in German again. The hydra guards come back, and Bucky feels his heart accelerate as they position themselves on either side of him, holding down his limbs. The doctor leaves; the assistant stands at the end of the table, just over Bucky’s head.

He feels a strange twist of both panic and relief when gloved hands cover his mouth and nose. No syringes, at least. And his lungs don’t start burning until after the first minute; he doesn’t start struggling until the second. Three minutes and Bucky’s brain gets foggy, his fighting weakens, and the assistant lets go. Bucky sucks in a grateful breath, in then out, in then out, before the assistant clamps his gloved hands down again, and the cycle repeats.

“Sergeant! Barnes, wake up, you’re having a nightmare, Barnes—“

Bucky gasps awake, pulling in deep lungfuls of air. He’s on a cot, the night dark, but he still recognizes Dugan over him. Bucky flinches away, sitting up quickly, ignoring the pounding in his skull.

“I’ll . . . I’ll go get Rogers—“

“No, don’t,” Bucky says quickly. “I’m fine, Dum-Dum. Honest. Don’t worry him over nothing.”

Dugan looks at him hard, frowning. “That’s a load of horseshit, Sarge, and you know it.”

Bucky doesn’t have a ready reply. It’s not okay, of course. He’s not fine. He’s dying, but these are his only moments of respite. Even when it’s big Steve, not real Steve, even when it’s times with the men that he knows, in the back of his head, are actually spending their days laboring in the factory. Even then, Bucky won’t let his miserable existence bleed into these god-given moments.

“I’m handling it, Dugan,” Bucky finally says, serious, and the older man sighs. “I’ve gotta be there for him. He’s strong now, sure, but he’s the biggest idiot I know. I can’t go home and leave him.”

With that, Bucky lives his double life. Falling asleep to protect angel Steve on the battlefields of Europe; waking up to metal, syringes, clinical touches. Only with the occasional flashes of his past life, or maybe his future life, of real Steve and Brooklyn and human touches.

Until the day everything crashes in on itself.

He’s supposed to be on watch. Told everyone to get some shut-eye, that he was too alert to get any right now. And it was true until he’s ripped from them, back onto the metal table. This time, however, it is not the doctor who looms above him.

It’s the devil himself. Bucky’s already met him in his dreams; ripping off a human face to reveal the red skull beneath. They’re hunting the devil down, in his dreams, and they’re winning.

But in reality Bucky’s an insect pinned by its wings, trapped even as it flutters them uselessly. The devil grins, says, “Docdor Sola belieffes he has replicaded the zerum, zanks to your cooperazion. Vell done, zoltier.” Bucky watches numbly as the devil unbuckles the straps. Then the devil procures a knife, poising it just below Bucky’s neck.

Relief washes over him. This is it. Maybe now he can leave forever, stay with angel Steve in their strange little heaven of bullets and campfires. He’s ready for it. He doesn’t want this life. Even if in reality, his real Steve is alive and safe at home, it’s better Bucky dies here.

There wouldn’t be much left of him to return, anyway.

But when the devil begins to cut Bucky can’t feel it. He’s aware of the sensation, of the pull of skin, but the devil just grabs his jaw with both red hands, and tugs hard.

Bucky’s face peels off, revealing red bone.

“ . . . _BUCKY_! Bucky. Please, come back to me. You’re safe, you’re with me. _Bucky_ , come on sweetheart. Listen, it’s Steve. Hear that, it’s Steve, it’s your pal. Come back to me. _Bucky_! Bucky, are you listening? You’re alright,” and Bucky comes to not thrashing, not crying out like usual. He’s sitting on the forest ground, far away from camp, with Steve kneeling in front of him. Hands on him.

Steve looks wrecked. Eyes red-rimmed, cheeks wet, lips trembling. His hands clutch either side of Bucky’s face, not gentle but not . . . meaningless. It feels right, actually, to be touching skin to skin with him. It doesn’t make Bucky want to wretch, or his skin to crawl.

Steve seems to recognize the life come back to Bucky’s eyes, his face falling with relief. He bows his head so their foreheads touch, another point of contact, and Bucky suppresses a shudder.

“You were gone,” Steve whispers in the small space between their mouths, voice haunted. “I came to take over watch for you, and you wouldn’t respond. You kept staring, Buck, you didn’t even move till I told you to.”

“Sorry,” Bucky whispers back, and regrets it immediately because Steve pulls back. His expression is fierce, despite the tear tracks.

“What happened?” he asks, though it sounds more like an order. “You gotta tell me, Buck, after this. I have to know.”

His blue eyes demand truth, but Bucky doesn’t know how to give it. How to explain what’s really happening, right now in the real world, even if he’s lost consciousness or managed to disconnect from it.

“I don’t want to wake up,” he finds himself admitting, pleading with any higher power who can hear. “I want to stay here.”

Steve’s face contorts in confusion. He puts his hands back on Bucky, thank god. “Whaddaya mean? Buck, you’re not going anywhere. Are you afraid that when you sleep, you’ll . . .”

“ _No._ No, I want to sleep, _please_ , I don’t want to go back there!” Bucky feels his breath speed up, imagining what he’s just escaped from. The devil, revealing Bucky’s bone to be the same treacherous red . . . “NO. _NO_ , stop, stop I don’t, _stop_ it,” he growls at himself, punctuating each ‘stop’ with a hit to the head. Steve grabs him almost immediately—restraints, wrapping around his hands, and Bucky yells wordlessly as he tries to free himself.

But Steve won’t let go. He holds Bucky’s wrists tight with one large hand and wraps the other arm entirely around him, leaning all the way back to the ground with Bucky stuck tight on top of him. “Stop this right now,” he orders, and Bucky collapses against him in surrender.

Bucky breathes into Steve’s chest as his heart slows back to a regular pace, limp in the larger man’s arms. He wishes he could stay. He wishes this was it, whether it was real or heaven, so he’d never ever have to go back. Never stop feeling Steve’s ribcage steadily rise and fall, his heart beat so sure, his hands turned so soft. Though they were never clinical or detached, their touch is affectionate now, more reassuring. Loving. Bucky focuses his mind entirely on the soothing motion of it, Steve’s big hand up and down his back. It’s easy, with this kind of grounding contact, to stay out of the horrifying headspace always looming over him.

Bucky idly wishes this moment would never end.

Inevitably, Steve eases them back up, though he keeps one arm around Bucky’s back as they sit against a tree. Bucky leans into him as much as he can. It’s not proper, not appropriate, but he couldn’t give less of a damn right now.

“Do you think you’re dreaming right now?” Steve asks solemnly. Bucky sneaks a glance at his eyes, and they’re kind but sad. Then again, they’ve always been a bit sad.

He makes himself nod, and Steve swallows loudly. “Okay. And when you . . . wake up, where are you?”

_In hell._

“Zola,” Bucky manages to say, hoping that detail is enough. But Steve merely frowns.

“Zola?”

“On the _table_ , Steve. On the table where you _found me_ ,” Bucky forces out, voice ragged.

“What happened there?” Steve says, and starts moving his hand up and down Bucky’s back again. He tries not to lean in to it. But he doesn’t want to focus on the things he goes through when he wakes up, because it’ll take him right back there.

Dreams only work when you don’t think about the fact they’re not real.

“They . . . take me apart.”

 _They unmade me,_ he doesn’t say.

Steve doesn’t respond for so long that Bucky risks another glance, and immediately regrets it. Steve’s eyes are wet again, his expression heart-shattering. He looks at Bucky like he’s lost him, and Bucky can’t even reassure him he hasn’t.

“Buck . . . you’re right here,” Steve whispers, and gently touches Bucky’s face with a palm. “Maybe that stuff won’t leave you but you gotta know you’re _here_ ; you’re free. It’s not a dream.”

“Yeah, well, you and your big body don’t help,” Bucky says, trying to keep his voice light. But Steve looks even more crestfallen.

“I’m sorry, Buck, I—“

“Shut it. Don’t you start on that,” Bucky stops him, “this ain’t your fault.”

“If I coulda been there, before you got captured—“

“I had a dream just like that.” Steve’s mouth shuts, his eyes wide. Bucky sighs, saying, “It didn’t change nothing. In fact, it got me on the table even sooner, looking after your punk ass.”

Steve chokes, on a laugh or a sob, Bucky can’t tell. “You can go back home,” Steve says in thick voice. “I’ll make them let you, Buck. You’re not alright if you think you’re still on that goddamn table. I should have made them from the beginning—“

“You needed someone to watch your six,” Bucky stops him, suddenly feeling a bit panicked. He scoots a bit away from Steve so he can look him in the eye. “I’ve done that, haven’t I? Better than anyone could. You need me, Rogers, that’s why I’m here—“

“You’re here because I’ve been _selfish_ ,” Steve says, eyes filled with anger. Bucky stares at him, not understanding, not able to match up this man with the self-righteous punk he’s known for so long—until Steve surges forward and their mouths meet.

In any case, Bucky’s brain has dreamed this up rather realistically: Steve is clueless when it comes to kissing. He just holds his lips still against Bucky’s mouth, breathing onto them before jerking away. He manages to look both ashamed and proud of himself as Bucky stares at him in shock.

“I could have done this without you,” Steve says, breathless, “but I didn’t _want to_. You get it now? I know it’s sick, it ain’t right, but even if you hate me, I need you Buck, just right here with me—“

“Shut your trap for a second,” Bucky hears himself interrupt, and Steve’s mouth moves open and shut, surprised. There’s a loaded moment of silence. He should be saying something, he told Steve to shut up so he could, but all Bucky really wants to do—

All Bucky really wants, all he ever wanted—

He holds either side of Steve’s face and slots their lips back together.

This time it’s at least a kiss. Steve’s fumbling still, lips uncertain as he moves them, but finally he lets Bucky take the lead. It’s soft, and wet, and warm. Bucky feels his own breath start hitching, but he’s not sure if it’s to laugh or cry. Maybe both. Steve leans back against the tree, lets Bucky turn the kiss possessive as he leans over him, flicking his tongue in and out.

When they finally have to part, panting into each other’s mouths, Bucky knows.

It can’t be more than a dream. Not after this. Not after _this._

“Buck,” Steve says, voice ragged, lips red and wet. Bucky can hardly stop himself from claiming them again.

“The men’ll start worryin’,” Bucky says, standing, holding out a hand. He takes it, eyes filled with a thousand conflicting worries, so Bucky kisses the corner of his mouth and says, “Come on, punk.”

Steve’s eyes soften, fill with warmth, and they don’t let go of each other’s hands until the last possible moment before joining the others.

They always shared a tent, but now Steve holds him at night. And Bucky, for the first time in weeks— _months?—_ doesn’t wake up back on the table. In fact, he only goes back twice that week, both times in the middle of the day, and Steve is there to pull him back right away. Hands on him, soft, kind and loving, don’t belong in Bucky’s reality of metal, syringes and clinical touches. They won’t mix.

Almost as soon as the doctor and his needles invade Bucky’s senses Steve is there, rubbing his arm, hand on his cheek, and Bucky blinks back from it and wonders if he’ll forever be dancing on the precipice of heaven and hell.

“You’re here, you’re safe,” Steve always tells him at night, a bedtime story, but the arms around him are what keep the metal table and the doctor at bay. Bucky wonders, after a week straight of not going back, whether he’s been crazy all along or if he’s finally dead. He wonders if he should care.

“I can finally prove it to you,” Steve murmurs into his neck between soft kisses. It’s the night before, before everything else happens. “You’ll see his face, see him locked up and helpless. You can put it behind you.”

Bucky reaches behind, where Steve is wrapped around him, and tugs Steve’s jaw up so he can kiss him. “Prove it to me now,” he whispers, though he knows this kind of intimacy with Steve is quite far-fetched, even for his messed-up head. If anything, it proves more that this is a dream.

But Steve complies. He slips in wet fingers first, curling them just right, and then his cock; he gently fucks into him, listens so carefully to every sound Bucky makes as he thrusts, mouth a searing brand between Bucky’s shoulder and neck. And Bucky prays this time, as Steve bites down and comes inside him, that the marks won’t heal.

The next day is freezing. The train is impossibly fast, and the weapons fire in chemical blue flashes—and Bucky thinks, just before Steve throws him the handgun, that it’s too soon. It’s not fair he dies when he just barely realized he’s still alive.

Then Steve does throw the gun, and Bucky shoots the last one down.

“Had ‘em on the ropes,” he says, even though he should say _Thank you_ , even though he wants to collapse and tell Steve, _We made it, we’re here, I’m here, all because you keep saving me_ , and Steve replies, “I know you did.”

Bucky looks up at Steve, wishing he could pin him to the train wall right now and press against his huge, angel body. He almost does. But Steve yanks him behind him, and with a blue flash the train car is torn apart. And with another the shield Bucky hastily grabbed goes flying.

He does too.

It’s freezing. He’s barely holding on. Steve has already saved him enough times, but he keeps saying, “Grab my hand!” So Bucky reaches.

He thinks, as he screams and falls, that at least it was all the truth. Every touch, every kiss. He’s been awake, because you can’t die in dreams, like he’s about to. The fall never ends. There’s no sickening snap, because right before you hit the bottom—

Bucky jerks awake on a metal table.

Hands on him.


End file.
